July 5, 1811, is rightly remembered as one of the key dates in our republican history. It commemorates nothing less than the Declaration of Independence from the Spanish Monarchy, and is the central act of the political and legal process of independence that began on April 19, 1810, and led to the promulgation of Venezuela’s first Constitution on December 21, 1811.
On March 2, 1811, the General Congress of Venezuela was convened, becoming the first Parliament in our republican history. That General Congress, meeting in what was then the chapel of the Santa Rosa de Lima Seminary in Caracas, had as its fundamental mission the drafting of the 1811 Constitution. However, two months after beginning its sessions, the nascent Republic felt the need to issue a formal declaration of independence from the Spanish Crown, thus clarifying the political separation of the previous three hundred years. Once the Congress had decided to move towards a republican government—after refusing on April 1810 to obey the French regime that had invaded Spain—it was incompatible with that decision not to make an unrestricted declaration of independence from the Crown.
In the sessions of July 3, 4, and 5, the problem, which was certainly not insignificant, was openly addressed, among other reasons because it was necessary to convince those who were not entirely convinced of the legitimacy or timeliness of the process. Ultimately, the declaration of independence required to substantiate the reasons for declaring independence.
Therefore, the Act of Independence will be a very well-founded argument for the reasons why independence is being declared. The first paragraph will establish the context in which the declaration of independence will be justified:
“In the name of Almighty God, we, the representatives of the United Provinces of Caracas, Cumaná, Barinas, Margarita, Barcelona, Mérida, and Trujillo, which form the American Confederation of Venezuela on the southern continent, assembled in Congress, and considering the full and absolute possession of our rights, which we justly and legitimately recovered on April 19, 1810, as a consequence of the events in Bayonne and the occupation of the Spanish throne by the conquest and succession of another new dynasty established without our consent, wish, before exercising the rights of which force had deprived us for more than three centuries, and which the political order of human events has restored to us, to make known to the world the reasons that have arisen from these same events and authorize the free exercise that we are about to make of our sovereignty.”
On July 5th, as the culmination of debates that had begun on July 3rd, independence was declared within the Congress. Later, in another session, the drafting of an Act to record the decision was decided. Therefore, although independence was declared by Congress on July 5th, the Act that justified it politically and legally was only read, approved, and signed on July 7th, having been drafted by Juan Germán Roscio and Francisco Isnardi.
The declaration of independence is a central element in our independence process, as it reflected the motivation behind the decision to sever political ties with the Monarchy under which these territories had lived for three centuries.
Indeed, the declaration of independence, from the perspective of the political and legal process that independence entailed, lies at the very heart, even temporally, of the first part of that process, which, at least in this initial and fundamental stage, was essentially civil. This stage begins with the events of April 19, 1810, and continues, among other events, with the establishment of the General Congress of Venezuela, and then proceeds, also among other events, with the Declaration of the Rights of the People of 1811 and the Constitution of 1811, of December 21.
Also from this perspective, it is worth noting that the Declaration of Independence occurred within the context of the first constituent process in our republican history. In fact, it can be pointed out that this constituent process, which began on April 19, 1810, and whose first stage culminated on December 21, 1811, is not only our first constituent process, but the only genuine constituent process that has existed in Venezuela.
In the institutional history of Venezuela, only one truly constituent process can be identified, the constituent process of 1811. During this process, the most important political transformation of our history took place.
This paragraph from the Declaration of Independence summarizes the truly constituent decision:
“In consideration of all these solid, public, and irrefutable political reasons, which so strongly persuade us of the need to recover the natural dignity that the course of events has restored to us, and in the exercise of the imprescriptible rights that peoples possess to dissolve any pact, agreement, or association that does not fulfill the purposes for which governments were instituted, we believe that we cannot and should not maintain the ties that bound us to the government of Spain, and that, like all the peoples of the world, we are free and authorized to be independent of any authority other than our own, and to assume among the powers of the earth the equal place that the Supreme Being and nature assign to us and to which the succession of human events and our own good and utility call us.”
The Declaration of Independence is particularly clear in the final paragraph of the Act:
“We, therefore, in the name and with the will and authority vested in us by the virtuous people of Venezuela, solemnly declare to the world that its United Provinces are, and from this day forward, in fact and in law, free, sovereign, and independent States, and that they are absolved from all submission and dependence on the Crown of Spain or on those who claim or may claim to be its agents or representatives, and that as such a free and independent State, it has full power to adopt the form of government that is in accordance with the general will of its people, to declare war, to make peace, to form alliances, to arrange treaties of commerce, boundaries, and navigation, and to perform all other acts that free and independent nations perform.”
Thus, July 5th is a date to commemorate an essentially civil event, one of the few that has occurred since in our republican history: faced with the political situation resulting from the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, Venezuelans questioned the legitimacy of their submission to that Crown. The independence process was, therefore, in its origins, a question based on ideas and on the concern for the legitimate and correct path to follow as a nation.
For this reason, a military celebration on July 5th is actually a historical anachronism. The main celebration of July 5th should take place in the National Assembly, the successor to the General Congress of Venezuela, where independence was declared and the Act of Independence was signed.